The location of the electrodes aren't arbitrary. The region of implantation is likely the hand-motor cortex (which has thickness on the order of mm), the area associated with arm movements (check out somatotopy), so the signals acquired are actually targeted for the demo task. This relationship has been known in neuroscience for almost a century and has been validated in decades of brain-machine interface experiments.
They are also recording from up to 1000 channels, which is probably overkill for mind pong, tbh. But you'll need that many implanted electrodes to study long term electrode biocompatibility.
Yeah their implant hardware is really impressive but "mind pong" is a pretty common starter project for at home EEG hacking, let alone legit BCI research. The internet is littered with examples of mind pong for the Muse like this one: https://medium.com/@nayvelt.lina/playing-ping-pong-with-my-b...
Granted it moves slower than actual Atari Pong, and takes a few minutes to get the hang of controlling the paddle. But IME it isn't much harder to control the up/down of the paddle with the EEG than it is to play a game like flappy bird, and that's using a couple random scalp electrodes from a consumer device.
So yeah thanks for bringing this up, because I feel some of the comments here are acting like this is much closer to "mind reading" than it actually is. Not that it isn't cool, but the overhyping kinda kills it for me lol. Is this how robotics people feel when Boston Dynamics releases a new video?
I'd argue it is the "Hello, World" in any BMI lab. Assuming existing implants and electronics, and non-naive monkey, advanced undergrads should get it in a semester.
It's not totally trivial, but a reasonably skilled person should be able to get a not-too-janky version working with a bit of effort. (Also, where are you that undergrads get to interact with monkeys?!)
I think the source of wonder here is that neural networks are very un-CPU like, in the level of correlation between the units. I'm not sure you could probe a CPU in a similar manner and be able to recover meaningful information. A binary 101X10 are entirely different numbers depending on what X is, for example, and you woulnd't necessarily expect X to correlate with the place values elsehwere (e.g. 1st and 5th bit). Similar arguments, apply, to probing different components, such as registers or instruction memory.
Funny you should compare understanding biological neural networks to a microprocessor. Check out this paper (https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...), which systematically addresses how applying traditional neuroscience methods to analyzing a microprocessor would get you.
I've read that paper years ago. I'm afraid I find it unimpressive. It is not so hard, really, to fail, when you fail to try. I have a computer science degree; I've built CPUs (from all the sequential and combinational circuits on up); I also work in neuroscience, and do some of the kinds of analysis this paper tries to criticize.
For example, a very basic approach is design experimental tasks that have contrasting conditions, or events to be predicted. They don't do that. Even something as simple as pressing the controller left vs right vs not moving at all in donkeykong would have been more interesting.
In any case, brains and traditional computer circuits work on different principles as I noted in my OP. Furthermore, there is quite a lot more redundancy in brains--and partial-redundancy is a bit of how it works; for example, if you have a population of neurons with different tuning curves, then the output in response to a stimulus can be integrated, and a likelihood distribution obtained for the actual value of a stimulus; that's just fundamentally different than how, say, a 5-stage pipelined RISC cpu works.
The most interesting thing here is not the mind reading, it is the miniaturization of computing and sparse data transfer. Neuralink off-loaded the computation to the sensor, sending back aggregate data snapshots. Usually you will need massive ASIC/FPGA computation banks with a lot of messy to handle the data transfer and readout but they took a shortcut bye sending only counts of spikes that exceeds a certain threshold.
There is nothing stopping you from using a cloth hangar. You just need to make sure it is impedance matched and properly sanitized for subdermal use. The signal will be much worse as a cloth hangar had gauge/diameter that is several magnitudes bigger than that of a neuron. Nothing here is particularly "novel" that it cannot be trivially replicated if you have the budget of one of the FAANGs. If you have 100million in capital, you can easily find poor neuroscience and EE PhDs who will be willing to work for you for <80K a year just for the opportunity to build something like this. The reason it is difficult and out of reach for smaller companies is because small amplifiers and electronic packages that can be subdermally implanted requires significant manufacturing capital as they fall under semiconductors and biomedical devices. Once the industry settle on a design expect the price to drop dramatically as the core chips and parts become commoditized.
Is there anyway to get this signal non invasively (magnetic field detection or photonically)? Or are implanted electrodes table stakes for a neural interface?
Not really, that we know of. To appreciate the complexity you could read this post[0] from Wait But Why? Your brain has approximately 40,000 neurons in the space of a cubic millimeter. Each saying something completely different. It’s incomprehensible noise unless you start dividing it up like Neuralink has. They get a few thousand probes in the size of a penny, which is a far greater level of resolution than you could probably ever expect from a wireless solution.
Do you think something like fMRI would have enough resolution? Can’t pick up activity directly of course, but perhaps by picking up fluid flow differentials?
As mentioned by a sibling comment, fMRI have a sufficient spatial resolution (i.e. you can watch the activity of a few number of neuron at a time instead of grouping them by batch of hhundreds of them), but the temporal resolution is low (order of magnitude is seconds; a single action potential is 5ms).
Noninvasive signal modality directly from the cortex are certainly possible (e.g. Ultrasound, fNIR). But they lack the spatial and temporal resolution of implanted electrodes. Intracortical brain signals are the most well understood and mature in terms of instrumentation as well. So in the short term, implanted electrodes offer the highest capacity for a BCI.
MI5 were lifting crypto keys based on keypress acoustics in the 50s, I wouldn't be so certain. If you put the phone up an expensive enough tool you can at very least find side channels
My understanding is that neurons are like a higher-order connected mesh. A bit like many fully-connected layers in a Machine Learning model.
You can't just read fine motor signals from any neuron, but given enough neurons, since they're deeply connected, you can infer a close approximation of the intended motor signals given a known output. That's why they need a lot of sampling wires in the brain; to makes sure they have enough data to make that inference. Luckily, machine-learning is very good at figuring out patterns in this sort of data.
My guess is that they train an ML model using the inputs and outputs when the joystick is connected. Then they can use the trained model to just generate the output directly from the inputs when the joystick is disconnected.
This will work fine for one particular monkeybrain/interface combo; however, you cannot use the same model on other monkeys. You have to train a new one each time.
Or have Bluetooth disabled by default for my brain.
The game examples were super fascinating, but since I was already essentially familiar with the fundamental principles and technology, it didn't quite impact me as much as the researcher pairing his iPhone with a Bluetooth transceiver in the monkey's brain. That sent weird shivers down my spine.
This reminds me of dropout where the neural network won’t be dependent on a specific connection. Instead, it will be statistical which will actually be a good fit for this approach.
>>> Our first goal is to give people with paralysis their digital freedom back
PKD's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" notwithstanding, "Consumer Neurotech" feels like one of those categories that even the most visionary of sci-fi writers failed to build into all aspects of human existence in the future ;)
That's just replaced with brain signal to chip then "decoder" then game software, which I would think is greater than nerve conduction velocity[1]. But then again, there's no "latency" of hand movement + joystick signal -> game software, so maybe it evens out?
This has been possible for decades without an implant.
The problem is that without an implant, only this is possible. Anything significantly more complex than moving a cursor on a screen is just not possible or feasible without an implant, because of physical (electromagnetic) limitations.
Our brain interface tech is so primitive, but it holds incredible promise if we're able to solve it.
Imagine being able to virtualize consciousness, back up memories, live forever...
The problem is how invasive it is, and how little reward there is initially. We have to solve the chicken and egg problem, but unfortunately cracking open the skull and sticking electrodes into the brain is not something one typically wants to do if they're conscious about their health.
I hope we can gain traction with medical applications and then begin to make steady advances. It'd be neat to have fully virtual, synthetic senses before we die.
Digitizing consciousness is a much harder problem, because we don't really understand how much of the brain works, the areas involved with conscious thought in particular, and the exact learning mechanisms the brain employs. The way we do deep learning these days is a very rough approximation of how the brain might work, and backpropagation is not really biologically plausible. So IMO, digitized consciousness is probably two to three orders of magnitude harder than this demo we're seeing here. Could unfortunately be a century away or more.
However, the medical applications should come much sooner. What they've shown is amazing. The monkey's control of the paddle seems to be precise and fast. If people who are paralyzed and wheelchair bound just had a way to operate the wheelchair, a robot arm, and communicate with the outside world reliably, that would already be amazing. If we could somehow reconnect their nerves or give them some kind of mechanized suit, it could be even better... And if Neuralink's tech works, that could be only 10-15 years away.
The thing i always think about with digital consciousness is that it would just be a clone that can’t distinguish itself from the OG consciousness that’s still resident in the brain.
The way this idea came to me was in a weird day dream thinking about the first experiment to attempt it... Patient lying on the table all wired up, a Dr. Frankenstein moment of ‘the upload’ followed by a screen witnessing the boot of the relocated consciousness. The doctor interacts with the persona, asking what it’s like and getting direct responses saying how amazing it is.
Meanwhile, amidst the commotion and celebration, you see the ’donor’ patient wake up in a reflection on the monitor and hear them faintly ask ‘did it work?’
I would argue that there is one consciousness, which is split into differing perspectives. I call that the multi-perspective being. This solves the teleport paradox (if you clone someone then where is the consciousness). The consciousness is everywhere, but split into differing perspectives.
Neuroscientists have been doing BCI with monkeys for years. Take a look at the work coming out of Byron Yu's and Steve Chase's labs at CMU for starters
I guess I just meant for this specific nerolink tech. He is definitely joined by a massive group of our distant cousins that have been involuntarily drafted into service for us. It's brutal, but so is life I guess. Hopefully this particular one doesn't mind it too much.
I'm convinced that this type of technology + some advancements in kinetic technology will allow for artificial telekinesis in the future. I don't know if it will be in my lifetime, but I would love to control it.
It could be billed based on the energy required to translate the objects.
More seriously, I actually yearn for the days of Star Trek and where we look at how innovations like this can make people's lives better first and then just stop there.
I was really excited to see the first goal they mentioned:
>Our first goal is to give people with paralysis their digital freedom back: to communicate more easily via text, to follow their curiosity on the web, to express their creativity through photography and art, and, yes, to play video games.
Modes of interaction in society are so poorly designed for anyone whos sensory functions are different than the norm. Bridging directly from the brain to interactions that currently require voice (normed to English Speaking White Males) or touch or movement or vision is a game changer not just for those who are paralyzed but many different groups for whom technology is not designed and is instead adapted.
This technology is simultaneously interesting for it's potential usefulness as a brain augmenting tool, and simultaneously terrifying because of the enormous potential for abuse. Still I'd probably work on it if I had a chance, though the choice of ultimately getting it would not be without consternation.
Hard to argue with the potential for a cognition-extending co-processor. And given that both the neural nets they use and the brains own neurons are capable of learning and adapting to each other, there's probably a world of potential here. This could very well be the start of the next stage in human evolution, unlocked by recent machine learning advances in particular, who's critically to this technology cannot be understated. What remains to see is how it works in (human) practice.
This is honest-to-god magic. Some cyberpunk, neuromancer, hardcore reality-bending shit. The brain is the final frontier, if technology gets a foothold in there things are going to get WILD.
Also, as this stuff gets further along, there's going to be large incentives for unethical testing. Rockets can be tested with unmanned flights, but you can't really dry run brain implants.
This isn't even the start of it. Everything in this video could be done with a non-invasive EEG, and has been possible for decades. This is a teaser video. The real magic of Neuralink has not been witnessed yet.
What smoothing algorithms did they use to guess the 'certainty' of the 'intended' movement in a Y-Plane game vs. the X,Y grid they learned from?
Having researched in this space, you don't get better results from 'training' on a X,Y space and reducing that training to a Y-grid predictor.
There is a ton of smoothing going on in the video... or the metal conductor plays a huge role in the electrical signals they get from the implanted electrodes. I once blew up a demo because of something like this metal stick as a constant I didn't think to consider.
> or the metal conductor plays a huge role in the electrical signals they get from the implanted electrodes
I highly doubt that, you must be talking about non-invasive electrodes such as EEG. When the electrodes are inside the brain and thus in the cranium, they are effectively protected from outside EM activity since they're in an effective Faraday cage, so your signal has much higher fidelity.
Nowhere near a perfect conductor. It, and the muscles around it, create noise and weaken the internal signal measured externally, acting as an effective cage. Measuring the signal from outside the skull is a bad idea. From inside (e.g. hippocampus), the electrodes are so much closer to the neurons, that the majority of the measured signal is not due to cranial noise.
> I highly doubt that, you must be talking about non-invasive electrodes such as EEG. When the electrodes are inside the brain and thus in the cranium, they are effectively protected from outside EM activity since they're in an effective Faraday cage, so your signal has much higher fidelity.
Yeah, I am speaking through non-invasive experience, however, unless your grounding is LIGO level sensitive, sticking a 3 ft metal pole into your mouth takes some significant processing to get a good ground, especially if it comes into contact with the earth and then you change your connectivity with opening and closing your mouth.
Again, low probability, but that just looks like it's asking for problems.
So we directly connect to the blood and tissue CPU and enable things not possible before like bringing mind control to paraplegics and avenues for brain ransomware. Imagine the future.
That was difficult to watch. While the technology is impressive, it is sickening to watch. The part where they can pair the phone via bluetooth made me want to vomit. It is obviously unnatural, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Something about seeing that animal, oblivious to what's happening, and that implant with the ability to directly record thoughts and/or remote control. The whole thing doesn't sit well with me.
I'm confused why you'd even feel that way? Neuralink goes into a LOT of effort for animals to feel good. Animal studies happen all the time for medical testing, and from what I hear Neuralink is much better than the average. As they said in the video, the animal is doing the activity of it of it's own free will. They don't harm the animal if it refuses to participate.
I initially thought GP was being overly hyperbolic, but after watching the video I can't say I fully disagree. It's not so much the animal studies aspect, but rather the fact that they used bluetooth via a mobile phone to connect to the monkey.
That aspect of connecting via bluetooth from a phone is most conventionally used to interact with replaceable commodities such as wireless speakers/headphones, but here it's being used to interact with a _live_ monkey. This framing somewhat gives the impression that this living being has been reduced to the status of a replaceable commodity, a mere peripheral that one might connect to via bluetooth.
I agree that given how much modern society relies on animal testing that it's not really a rational response - maybe this reaction could have been mitigated somewhat if they had connected to the monkey via a computer or more involved process rather than simply just the conventional bluetooth pairing flow on a phone.
> That aspect of connecting via bluetooth from a phone is most conventionally used to interact with replaceable commodities such as wireless speakers/headphones, but here it's being used to interact with a _live_ monkey.
I understand that, but I think to some degree, you're letting somewhat unrelated things influence your opinion of this.
You know what else it interacted with and controlled wirelessly? Pacemakers. Nobody thinks of those people are replaceable commodities.
Also, what about those that don't live a life of luxury and have access to lots of commoditized devices that wirelessly pair through a cellphone? People in less affluent countries might be less jaded about controlling something wirelessly and still view that as an amazing new technology associated with things they can rarely afford.
So, to what degree are those associations useful and accurate, and to what degree are they you bringing unrelated prior biases to bear?
I think you articulated it well. It trivializes life. Countless animals die horrifically for science, but much of it is ultimately in the pursuit of valuing human life. This is something different. This animal has been reduced to a device accessory.
After watching macro trends in U.S. politics and tech for a while, I've held (but not articulated much) a sense that power is shifting from federal government to private interests. Previously that would have meant corporate boards, but I think increasingly it's a small number of individuals (due to realpolitik).
The good thing about messy, human models of transactions and interaction is that it can take a long time and many different voices can be heard, allowing disuptes to occur and be resolved.
Many of these successful tech corporates work to eliminate the human discussion element, and replace it with digitized (and frequently proprietary, or at least gatekept) rules.
I think I've dealt with a few difficult dominant personality types in the past, and it would not surprise me at all to see them consider humans-as-pets as a desirable future. Match that with digitized 'asset ownership' and other non-repudiable mechanisms and there could be a very dystopian and authoritarian future in the mind of some of these people.
Now I'll make sure to sound like a complete nutter (as if I hadn't already) and mention that some of these individuals and companies are now so essential to the U.S., both domestically and internationally, that they are becoming untouchable.
Meanwhile our own tech industry is busy debating and trying to determine what the future of libre software will look like. It's a pivotal moment and I'm optimistic we'll figure it out to everyone's benefit, but there is a lot at stake.
I‘m working for a company which makes apps connecting to insulin pens and pumps via Bluetooth. Once you get into the mindset of connecting medical devices to your phone, this feeling of cheap commodity entirely disappears. Bluetooth and phones can be awesome tools, and if implemented with enough verification and validation, are sufficiently safe.
For me, I find it unsettling because it's a reminder of how ultimately we're all just compositions of atoms with electric signals in our body. While I find this immensely exciting, it unnervingly reminds me of my mortality.
It's akin to what I imagine Neo would've felt when he learnt about the Matrix. I'd like to think I'd have without a doubt taken the red pill too (like I want this kind of research to be more successful) but anything that makes the Matrix more real is unsettling.
I'm not buying the idea that the animals somehow benefit from this. I'm not necessarily against animal testing either. But it's one thing to test on animals to develop lifesaving cures and another thing entirely sure to experiment with brain implants with the potential to take away a living creature's free will. Or the ability to intrude on thought. The whole thing is pretty gross.
It's great that this tech could help paralyzed people and amputees, but is it worth the cost?
To the paralyzed and the amputees, absolutely. The faster the advancement happens, the sooner animals models can be deprecated. Nobody wants to use animal models, they are a necessary evil.
Edit: This is a moot point if it turns out we can repair the damage from paralysis and amputation using bioengineering.
If you've never gone through the process of bringing a medical device to market, well, I'm not sure there's an easy FAQ that will answer your scepticism. But the basic idea is that you have to do a bunch of testing in the lab, then probably a bunch in animals, then finally a bunch in human clinical trials, then you can actually market the device to the public.
Neuralink is in the 'animal testing' phase, and it sounds like they're likely to start human testing soon.
Note that once they've gotten a device approved for humans, that doesn't mean they will stop testing on animals. There will likely be improvements to the device, new protocols, etc. that will necessitate continued testing as new features are brought to market.
> Among the types of evidence that may be required, when appropriate, to determine that there is reasonable assurance that a device is safe are investigations using laboratory animals, investigations involving human subjects, and nonclinical investigations including in vitro studies.
> The part where they can pair the phone via bluetooth made me want to vomit.
I had the same reaction. I just recently had a lot of trouble pairing Airpods to Macbook (both no more than 2 years old). If Apple can't make it work between their own devices, it's doomed. A piece of shit technology, a black stain on the whole stack.
The demo is impressive otherwise, and I don't think it's weird to control a device with your mind. Or, if weird, it's the interesting kind of weird.
I'd like to see a multi-modal GPT successor that learns not just text, image and video but also neural brain signals. It's one modality we haven't touched on yet. Maybe it will be able to extract speech directly from the brain, which is orders of magnitude harder than controlling a joystick.
With a few decades (years?) of refinement, this technology absolutely has the potential to capture private thoughts.
Sure, it may require an implant, but just like we all carry tracking beacons that have become indispensable to daily life today, in 20 years it may be “the done thing” to have an implant to control your home automation, etc. Or maybe the tech will improve to where it just needs a hat. And at that point, certain authorities will have no qualms about using it in interrogations, with or without “due process.”
Maybe you're onto something. Assuming your intent is to obtain information from a captured enemy at all costs, an implant like this is probably far more humane than waterboarding or actual torture.
There is a big difference between decoding covert and even "imagined speech" and decoding "thoughts". In covert/imagined speech decoding, the user actually tries very hard to imagine the action of speaking and moving the corresponding vocal articulators, without actually doing it. This is similar to mental motor rehearsal done in sports training.
It works because there is direct correlation between the speech-motor cortex and how the vocal articulators (larynx, tongue, etc) move, and how that combine to produce speech.
Abstract "thoughts", on the other hand, are not so straight-forward. For one, there's no central location in the cortex where the concept of "car", for example, lives. The distributed representation of abstract thoughts within the brain makes it orders of magnitude more difficult than decoding speech for one specific individual. Then add orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude to generalize that to different people.
Yeah, it's not that hard to imagine the next bit where there's a captive warehouse of monkeys solving CAPTCHAS for food or something. It's a depressing video to be sure.
The assumption being that human lives are far more valuable than non-human lives.
Where it gets funky though is trying to quantify that to an extent: how many monkey disfigurements is worth fixing one human disfigurement? Ten? A thousand?
How many chimps would you blind in order to prevent humans being blinded by the latest lash extension cosmetic?
> The assumption being that human lives are far more valuable than non-human lives
Is it even controversial that yes, of course they are?
I mean, Boeing and the FAA kept 737 MAX's in the air after brown people died in the first crash when we all know they'd have grounded them if it was a crash in Kansas. We value human lives differently let alone animals.
> How many chimps would you blind in order to prevent humans being blinded by the latest lash extension cosmetic?
None. But I'd blind as many as are needed to trial human eye transplants, for example.
First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs
Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again
This is nothing compared to what we were doing in lab several years ago. Neuralink is the least invasive of the invasive ways to conduct this research. I had to put animals down, because they would be defunct after trying to remove those bulkier devices. Neuralink is relatively humane, speaking as someone who has seen this technology in its infancy.
The monkey probably won't be sad. I think it is entertained all day by the researchers. Playing its games, and drinking its delicious banana smoothie. As you say; Ignorance is bliss.
Perhaps it is blissfully ignorant of us to think of ourselves as free on this rock. Does the monkey have a better life now than before? I don't know. The monkey will not mate and likely does not have peers. I wouldn't be surprised if those things are required for happiness. Social and sexual needs are programmed in us.
I think it's a pretty tough topic in ethics but when I was younger, I didn't think much about it because we were doing science. I remember seeing my first rat die. I didn't feel bad at the time because we did it "humanely" with gas (and it's normalized and I was only 20) and they just sort of drifted off and defecated. It's an interesting and perhaps sad use of a life.
> The monkey probably won't be sad. I think it is entertained all day by the researchers. Playing its games, and drinking its delicious banana smoothie.
Rhesus Macaques [0] have a lifespan of thirty years. Thirty years. Thirty years in a massively controlled environment, often sedentary, with limited opportunities to socialise with peers, and the simple pleasures of mutual grooming, lying in the sun etc. Lab animals that are rehomed in rehab centres / zoos etc are often overweight, in poor health, and have a range of nervous tics and social inexperience. Many adapt to the non-lab environment, but they tend to have underlying health problems and issues with acceptance by the alpha individuals because they lack the years of experience required to understand and fit into the complex group etiquette.
Animals may still be the best model for testing drugs / devices that will go into humans, but lets not understate the massive cost to the individual animals concerned.
[Source: personal involvement with a primate rehab centre]
Neuralink monkeys are housed with at least one other monkey for grooming / social activities, and are in the same room with visibility to other monkeys. Are they as happy as zoo monkeys? Probably not. But they're probably much happier than most other research monkeys.
> Thirty years in a massively controlled environment, often sedentary, with limited opportunities to socialise with peers, and the simple pleasures of mutual grooming, lying in the sun etc
Zoos are bastions of conservation. They are usually only filled by rescue animals, and their funds are often used in conservation and animal welfare programs.
is that really always the case? do you have some data about it I can look into?
I stopped going to zoos because I didn't want to contribute to keeping animals like that, but would like to read information to the contrary if that's the case.
I’ve never been to zoos outside the UK, but here often the primary function is conservation - both of the animals, which are often rescues, and of wider wildlife which is funded by ticket sales
For example, London Zoo is managed by the charity Zoological Society of London [0] and places like Monkey World are essentially rescue centres you can visit [1]
> places like Monkey World are essentially rescue centres you can visit
Can confirm this (disclaimer- I'm a supporter). Many of their animals are rescues, including more than 70 Capuchins that had been lab animals in Chile and four groups of Chimpanzees, many of whom had been rescued from use in circuses or as tourist props - the latter often with teeth knocked out so that they couldn't bite the punters. There is currently a sadly growing collection of marmosets, most rescued from the UK pet trade after tipoffs from animal protection agencies. Many of the marmosets have diseases such as rickets resulting from their owners' lack of animal husbandry skills (e.g. thinking that all they need to eat is bananas). Most of these animals lack the survival skills or health to be released back into the wild. On a more positive note, Monkey World is also a hub for breeding critically endangered species, e.g. Woolly Monkeys and Orangutans.
Sadly, if an animal is being cared for at Monkey World, it generally means that the specific individual has been abused in the past and / or the species faces functional extinction in the wild.
I think it depends on the individual zoo. It's up to them to take part in conservation programs or to stick to keeping animals exclusively for display.
The one where I live has historically been a bunch of very desolate animal display cases, but they've committed to doing what amounts to a slow U-turn, and they have done quite well in that regard.
The old enclosures were clearly built to keep animals in plain view at all times. They've remodelled a lot of them since, and they're completely rebuilding some. There are times where you don't see a single great ape during a whole visit, because their new habitats have some caves and comfy areas hidden from view, with the result that especially the gorillas now appear to have quite a bit of fun interacting with visitors at the four separate points in their enclosure where that is possible and definitely seem much more relaxed than the previous generations (as far as I can tell, I'm no gorilla myself).
Certainly still worse than a life in their natural habitat, but they are part of a multinational conservation project and all their current gorillas were essentially sent to them via this project, with the end-goal of (as I understand it) having a viable captive gorilla population in zoos around the world so there is a "backup" in case the natural populations collapse. The living conditions they provide have earned praise from experts (for what that's worth, seeing they're not gorillas themselves, either).
They still keep their lions in a tiny, cruel pen, but they're building a new one currently that is supposed to be state of the art. Most monkeys have gotten new accomodations last year I think and they're pretty involved in keeping Kunekune pigs from going almost extinct a second time and they're breeding Visayan Warty Pigs (which are absolutely amazing things, and critically endangered); I guess for a relatively provincial central European zoo with a limited budget, that's quite decent.
They've also recently completed a pretty big section with heirloom breeds of common farm animals and they do a lot of education programs and events for schools, which I feel is something my generation missed out on big time, not necessarily from a zoo, but some kind of getting in contact with animals other than the occasional cat or dog might have been quite helpful. I feel there are some really weird misconceptions about animals that are pretty widespread among people my age.
For what it's worth, I've been quite opposed to that zoo in the past, but their efforts over the last decade or so have been enough to convince me to pay for a year pass. Some zoos are much slower adopting this approach, I surely wouldn't be as supportive of one of those.
It's not hard to imagine them implanting Neuralink-type devices in humans to make Minority Report a reality. And that's just read-mode. With write-mode, I bet they could easily figure out a way to make wrong thoughts physically impossible to think.
It's only a matter of time before certain governments start alpha-testing this type of technology in places like Xinjiang or Myanmar.
Yes, it's weird in its special way. Especially the part you mentioned in which they are pairing a phone. Rest assured, this is the most humane invasive lab work on an animal I have ever seen. If you want nightmares check out how they test cochlear implants for example ... No, really, don't do that.
For me the strangest part of watching this is not the lab work or the animal, but the implications of this technology and where it might lead to in the future once applied to humans. I really like the idea and premise presented, but let's be honest: There are also way too many evil use cases ...
This is how progress is made. Similarly, people in DaVinci's times were sickened by his autopsies but that doesn't mean there was something wrong about them.
To counter with an extreme example: plenty of medical progress was made via Nazi and Japanese experiments on live subjects during the second world war. So no, categorically the ends does not always justify the means.
1) The deliberately soothing British voice does not come off as soothing. It comes off as insidious, and threatening. This is in part influenced by our own cultural context with media like Black Mirror, but the effect is there nonetheless.
2) The comparison points to "pair with your iPhone" feel WILDLY misaligned with the rest of the message. The premise of Neuralink is that this is a world-changing cutting edge technology for the good of humanity. Then all of a sudden you have a situation where a living sentient being is paired to an iPhone like some sort of bluetooth speaker. It reeks of confused ethics.
I'd encourage anyone worried about the ethics of animal experiments in research like this to come up with prioritisation metrics over a number of animal welfare cause areas as an exercise. Surely a small number of well-cared for animals in high-upside experiments are lower on the list than say, pigs for pork sausages, which have worse welfare, smaller upsides and are more cost efficient to campaign against.
Would you respond the same way to ethical concerns about the treatment of a small number of humans? If we could find larger groups of humans facing worse treatment (and surely we could), you might conclude that the smaller, less-poorly treated group is simply not worth discussing. But I'd argue in that case (as I would in this one) that the conclusion is mistaken.
Also, if I may ask, do you think we have to choose between caring about these individuals and caring about those in factory farms? I personally care about both (as well as plenty of other ethical issues, naturally). And I imagine other people feel the same. So your suggestion that we measure the two causes against each other is rather confusing.
You only have a finite amount of time and resources, the way in which you choose to spend them can have enormous influence on the resulting impact. Given this, you have to prioritize. If you are not prioritizing, then somebody or something is doing it for you.
I don't think these monkeys are "not worth discussing" - but I don't think they merit more than a cursory evaluation. The same is true for say, people that are killed by falling coconuts.
There are, in all likelihood, cost-effective causes that you can donate to, in terms of your dollars, skills and capcity to give a damn. I'd suggest these monkeys shouldn't make the list.
Interesting. And you think these monkeys shouldn't make anyone's list? (I'm inferring, given that you began by addressing "anyone" with ethical concerns.)
I'd understand if you said they didn't make the cut for you personally, but I'm not sure why you'd be invested in ruling them out for everyone.
(And this a sidebar, but I think one could quite reasonably believe that advocacy here is worthwhile in exactly the bang-per-buck utilitarian sense you're invoking. For instance, people who are galvanized on behalf on these monkeys might then change their actions towards less visible, less relatable nonhumans like pigs, chickens, and fishes.)
Pretty much everyone - if you work for neuralink there's some chance of cheap interventions here, but outside of that it seems unlikely.
The latter point (galvanised to support other welfare causes) is roughly what inspired the original post - our intuitive emotional reactions to visible harm should indeed encourage effort in investing in effective harm reduction advocacy. But if seeing these monkeys makes you sad, you really ought to think about all the less-visible, cheap to attack welfare issues that are available.
( I avoided it in the headline comment so as not to seem to shill, but if you're interested in what cause areas come out ahead, I broadly endorse, but am not affiliated with, the analysis here: https://animalcharityevaluators.org/charity-reviews/all-char... )
Thanks for sharing! It's a good resource and not one I've come across before.
So I do very much appreciate the spirit of your comment: that we should attend to less visible (and more easily addressed) harms, and not get caught up in 'celebrity causes,' so to speak.
But I think where I differ from you is that I don't view it as an either-or paradigm. I'd say to people "Go ahead and try to help these monkey individuals, and also work for, e.g., food-farmed nonhumans (who are easier to help, etc.)"
I appreciate the risk you're citing, that people could effectively "waste" time and resources on a case like this. But I'd argue there's a greater risk in approaching ethics as A) zero sum, and B) generalizable. I'll elaborate:
A) It's certainly true that we only have so many minutes in the day and so many dollars in our wallet. But I think these zero-sum resources are often not the final limit on what we can do. Rather, the limits we reach are emotional and psychological energy - which is often not zero-sum. Getting engaged in an issue (especially when it's an issue that radicalizes you) can actually increase the amount of time and resources you find for other issues. (I.e., you reclaim it from less important stuff.)
B) I'd argue ethics is patently not generalizable (in the sense that you're suggesting - i.e. that everyone should reach the same conclusion about which cases are worth effort), simply because humans are so varied. One person might have tons of money and be happy to spend on this cause in addition to whatever they give to help farmed nonhumans. Another person might feel a special bond with monkeys that makes this an easy, non-taxing (or even net-energy-positive) issue to engage in. Yet another person might currently find the plight of food-farmed nonhumans overwhelming to consider, but these monkeys will be a stepping-stone issue that help them get there. Etc.
Bluetooth (BT) is simply a wireless standard for exchanging data between devices over short distances. It is very widespread, reliable enough and easy to develop and integrate. It's an understandable and common choice in the medical devices field.
In a more developed, market society, you typically have several commoditized, replaceable products and most tend to leverage BT. The idea of replaceableness belongs to the product itself, but what we see in common for all of them is BT connectivity, so we tend to perceive BT as an identifier of replaceableness as well.
Neuralink very casually and tongue-in-cheek BT "paired" to the monkey, reinforcing the idea of replaceability and commoditization of the monkey.
Many people have empathy for animals and monkeys are seen as precursors to humans. It's very easy to see how treating a pre-human species like a replaceable product, leaves humans themselves creeped out and feeling like in the future they may also be treated like a replaceable product.
Neuralink needs an ethicist in a high exec position or board and a better PR manager. They should have done some of these to reduce that perception mess:
- allude to the use of BT in serious medical applications before "pairing" with the monkey
- reduce or change the common BT terms like pairing
- use a computer rather than a smartphone
- don't mention BT, just say wirelessly connected
- don't use a Bond-villain smooth British voice
By talking about it as a PR problem, I don't mean to say that is the root cause, it is just what we can see at the surface.
Do they really care about ethics? Is it execs, engineers, video directors, everyone, no one? Do they care, but are just bad at PR? Do they not care, and this video is a reflection of that? This is what matters, for all those people to genuinely care about ethics.
Can they still genuinely care though, after becoming a corporation? Can bringing shareholder value align with ethics?
One botched video is simply one data point in the public trying to understand Neuralink's genuine stance on ethics.
Only people with close contact to Neuralink will really know. We are all hyper connected, but sadly, only superficially.
This seems to be very similar to the early 2000s demos at Brown University/Cyberkinetics[1]. In 2008 they demonstrated it in humans[2] after lots of work getting FDA approval. The core difference here (from my non-expert reading) seem to be electrodes are along a thread rather than on a chip.
Can somebody who is knowledgeable in this field of work explain how/if neuralink is better to the previous approaches and if its easier to "scale" this tech compared to previous works ?
The article describes how it has advanced: it's wireless and reads relatively more electrodes. Producing the device is something that can probably scale up easilt . 1024 electrodes is still nowhere near enough to decode precise movements imho. These pong experiments have been done in humans since 20 years ago, but real fluidity seems very difficult to achieve , because signals are noisy, the brain adapts, distractors are always present etc. The article doesnt mention how long it takes until the device needs recalibration. OTOH brain surgery is not something easy to scale and i doubt people will accept surgery for implanting 2 devices just to play pong. Such a device should be precise enough to allow using a robotic arm effectively.
I think the applications of this are going to be in research for years, not as implants that paralyzed people can readily use.
This is primarily an advance in the systems integration required to make such a sensor fully implantable abs capable of wireless transmission. It also ~10x’s the number of channels of the Utah array, which is the primary point of comparison as a product that can currently be used in human patients (in an investigational context as part of clinical trials). The Utah arrays do not have any active electronics however, and pass a bundle of wires through the skin, which has obvious disadvantages and scaling limitations.
NL’s approach is scalable due to their robotic insertion system which can implant a (multi-channel) thread every few seconds. It should be possible to hit a few thousand channels within the window of a few hour surgery. They do face the same challenges with size, weight, and power that everyone else does, which forces trade offs on the bandwidth, ability to isolate spikes from individual neurons, and number of active channels.
The primary limitation of this approach is that the needles cannot easily insert deeper than the outer layer of cortex (to my knowledge). This limits the application space to anything with recording or stimulation targets on the surface. Motor prostheses and gaming are perfect for this due to the anatomy, but many other medical applications require deeper targets, which their sensor cannot readily hit at the moment.
This is a great summary. I will just add that my understanding is that Neuralink is heavily focused on surgical speed, and a few seconds per thread is the slowest it will ever be. It will likely be much faster than that.
In this video, it looks like they are probably only sampling ~200 locations (assuming that's a 1080p screen and they have gone for one pixel per signal)
Data entry will probably be obliterated as you will just be able to insert rows into databases or spreadsheets in a few milliseconds rather than needing to type out entries from papers or receipts. There are already ML solutions to this but none are as perfect as a human brain that can correctly decode arbitrary formatting.
Keyboards and mice will be phased out very quickly since you can just thought type, so the computer accessories industry will dry up as well.
If the device allows you to write to limbs, you will probably also be able to write to motors. Expect a lot of specialized vehicle related jobs (excavators, forklifts, cranes) to become remote-first with skilled operators working inside call centers or at home. This is already happening but the presence of Neuralink means contracting companies don't have to pay for expensive joysticks, knobs, switchboards, etc.
Of course this doesn't consider the impact on the entire world changing overnight, which will probably upend modern capitalism for the first time in a century.
I think you're overestimating the speed at which these changes will happen. It will likely be ~a decade before the first non-paralyzed person uses this device. It'll take many more decades before they're widely available, much less widely installed.
"What better reward for a monkey, than a banana"? what about FREEDOM?
I am not a vegan/whatever/animal activist, but maybe we should allow terminally-ill or death-row volunteers for this kind of experiment... With good money for the family, and I think some people would like to help mankind in the end. It is better than dying without accomplishing anything in life.
So, you have at most one year with an inoperable tumor, and you will not travel because you want to be close to your family. Would you be a volunteer for this research, for 500 thousand dollars? (monkeys are cheaper, but you are the real deal)
Yeah I'd volunteer for implant testing if I had a 6 month life expectancy due to a terminal illness.
I don't think it's a good idea to allow death-row inmates to do this though; They'd likely be pressured into volunteering as the only way to delay the execution.
This sounds like the plot of a movie: death-row inmate forced to volunteer for implant testing, but he manages to connect to some kind of military robot and fights for his freedom.
You said you’re not a vegan, so to be clear your okay with factory farms crushing pigs to death but minimally invasive surgery on monkeys so they can play pong is too far? I don’t care about your stance on animal consumption particularly, but don’t you find that a little hypocritical?
OP might be referring to pigs crushing each other to death because of overcrowding in badly-run farms and during transportation. Farmers don't throw pigs in trash compactors (and why would they? Non-compacted pigs is how they do earn their money.)
Is your first statement not a kind of strawman argument? ( https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman ) I mean, I am not vegan too but it doesn't mean I am ok with pigs crushed to death anyway. I think I see the point that you want to make though: somehow it should feel as if this minimal surgery ought to be "logically" more morally acceptable than killing animals to eat them. But don't you think morality could be just the name of a preference function deeply encoded in each individual brain and which doesn't require to be "rationally tuned"? (So that it can lead to weird irrational situations as in, I am ok with eating meat but I feel uncomfortable at the idea of killing animals)
Yep, I agree this sounds hypocritical,but everybody has different "lines" to cross. I guess mine is how close they are to humans. (98%), and I also differentiate "food" from "experiment".
Patients undergoing brain surgeries are routinely asked to volunteer for neuroscientific studies and they often do so. Terminally ill patients also donate their brain tissue for tons of studies more often than you would think. But the scope of experiments that one can do with them and the available multimodal data available from parallel studies in human cortex is extremely limited.
On the other hand, non-human primates are readily available in a controlled environment, can be used to generate huge amounts of data specific to a diverse set of tasks and experiments that you just can not do on the human patients.
The brain is a complex machine that is extremely hard to decipher just by studying a single species or one kind of experiments. The need for studies across species with a hundred different ways of collecting and analysing data is essential to first understand the mechnasims of the brain and only then (hopefully) be able to causally alter it for specific applications in medicine and so on.
289 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadLike, you can't just tape a metal coat hanger to an iPhone and start getting text messages through it.
But somehow you can put some wires just as few mm into the surface of a brain and extract fine motor signals??
They are also recording from up to 1000 channels, which is probably overkill for mind pong, tbh. But you'll need that many implanted electrodes to study long term electrode biocompatibility.
Not exactly “Hello, World” but maybe “ToDo List App”.
Granted it moves slower than actual Atari Pong, and takes a few minutes to get the hang of controlling the paddle. But IME it isn't much harder to control the up/down of the paddle with the EEG than it is to play a game like flappy bird, and that's using a couple random scalp electrodes from a consumer device.
So yeah thanks for bringing this up, because I feel some of the comments here are acting like this is much closer to "mind reading" than it actually is. Not that it isn't cool, but the overhyping kinda kills it for me lol. Is this how robotics people feel when Boston Dynamics releases a new video?
It's not totally trivial, but a reasonably skilled person should be able to get a not-too-janky version working with a bit of effort. (Also, where are you that undergrads get to interact with monkeys?!)
For example, a very basic approach is design experimental tasks that have contrasting conditions, or events to be predicted. They don't do that. Even something as simple as pressing the controller left vs right vs not moving at all in donkeykong would have been more interesting.
In any case, brains and traditional computer circuits work on different principles as I noted in my OP. Furthermore, there is quite a lot more redundancy in brains--and partial-redundancy is a bit of how it works; for example, if you have a population of neurons with different tuning curves, then the output in response to a stimulus can be integrated, and a likelihood distribution obtained for the actual value of a stimulus; that's just fundamentally different than how, say, a 5-stage pipelined RISC cpu works.
There is nothing stopping you from using a cloth hangar. You just need to make sure it is impedance matched and properly sanitized for subdermal use. The signal will be much worse as a cloth hangar had gauge/diameter that is several magnitudes bigger than that of a neuron. Nothing here is particularly "novel" that it cannot be trivially replicated if you have the budget of one of the FAANGs. If you have 100million in capital, you can easily find poor neuroscience and EE PhDs who will be willing to work for you for <80K a year just for the opportunity to build something like this. The reason it is difficult and out of reach for smaller companies is because small amplifiers and electronic packages that can be subdermally implanted requires significant manufacturing capital as they fall under semiconductors and biomedical devices. Once the industry settle on a design expect the price to drop dramatically as the core chips and parts become commoditized.
[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
Here's a graph that summarize the temporal/spatial tradeoff of the different BMI tech: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-various-neural-recor...
*a shortcut by
You can't just read fine motor signals from any neuron, but given enough neurons, since they're deeply connected, you can infer a close approximation of the intended motor signals given a known output. That's why they need a lot of sampling wires in the brain; to makes sure they have enough data to make that inference. Luckily, machine-learning is very good at figuring out patterns in this sort of data.
My guess is that they train an ML model using the inputs and outputs when the joystick is connected. Then they can use the trained model to just generate the output directly from the inputs when the joystick is disconnected.
This will work fine for one particular monkeybrain/interface combo; however, you cannot use the same model on other monkeys. You have to train a new one each time.
You could if we didn't encrypt connections.
On that note, does anyone know how to upgrade libssl across my entire nervous system?
‘Inception’ shows someone who tries to do something like that, but there seems to be a vulnerability.
The game examples were super fascinating, but since I was already essentially familiar with the fundamental principles and technology, it didn't quite impact me as much as the researcher pairing his iPhone with a Bluetooth transceiver in the monkey's brain. That sent weird shivers down my spine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_(neural_networks)
You can get a 128 key out of most electronic devices in a reasonable amount of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_attack#Known_a...
PKD's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" notwithstanding, "Consumer Neurotech" feels like one of those categories that even the most visionary of sci-fi writers failed to build into all aspects of human existence in the future ;)
[1] https://www.economist.com/1843/2017/03/31/the-novelist-who-i...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity
Two years ago without a brain implant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMXfyZc_Gvg
The problem is that without an implant, only this is possible. Anything significantly more complex than moving a cursor on a screen is just not possible or feasible without an implant, because of physical (electromagnetic) limitations.
Imagine being able to virtualize consciousness, back up memories, live forever...
The problem is how invasive it is, and how little reward there is initially. We have to solve the chicken and egg problem, but unfortunately cracking open the skull and sticking electrodes into the brain is not something one typically wants to do if they're conscious about their health.
I hope we can gain traction with medical applications and then begin to make steady advances. It'd be neat to have fully virtual, synthetic senses before we die.
However, the medical applications should come much sooner. What they've shown is amazing. The monkey's control of the paddle seems to be precise and fast. If people who are paralyzed and wheelchair bound just had a way to operate the wheelchair, a robot arm, and communicate with the outside world reliably, that would already be amazing. If we could somehow reconnect their nerves or give them some kind of mechanized suit, it could be even better... And if Neuralink's tech works, that could be only 10-15 years away.
The way this idea came to me was in a weird day dream thinking about the first experiment to attempt it... Patient lying on the table all wired up, a Dr. Frankenstein moment of ‘the upload’ followed by a screen witnessing the boot of the relocated consciousness. The doctor interacts with the persona, asking what it’s like and getting direct responses saying how amazing it is.
Meanwhile, amidst the commotion and celebration, you see the ’donor’ patient wake up in a reflection on the monitor and hear them faintly ask ‘did it work?’
It could be billed based on the energy required to translate the objects.
More seriously, I actually yearn for the days of Star Trek and where we look at how innovations like this can make people's lives better first and then just stop there.
I was really excited to see the first goal they mentioned:
>Our first goal is to give people with paralysis their digital freedom back: to communicate more easily via text, to follow their curiosity on the web, to express their creativity through photography and art, and, yes, to play video games.
Modes of interaction in society are so poorly designed for anyone whos sensory functions are different than the norm. Bridging directly from the brain to interactions that currently require voice (normed to English Speaking White Males) or touch or movement or vision is a game changer not just for those who are paralyzed but many different groups for whom technology is not designed and is instead adapted.
It could be, but it will be billed with ads inserted directly in to your brain that you can’t skip or turn off - even with your eyes closed.
Oh wait...
Hard to argue with the potential for a cognition-extending co-processor. And given that both the neural nets they use and the brains own neurons are capable of learning and adapting to each other, there's probably a world of potential here. This could very well be the start of the next stage in human evolution, unlocked by recent machine learning advances in particular, who's critically to this technology cannot be understated. What remains to see is how it works in (human) practice.
Also, as this stuff gets further along, there's going to be large incentives for unethical testing. Rockets can be tested with unmanned flights, but you can't really dry run brain implants.
What smoothing algorithms did they use to guess the 'certainty' of the 'intended' movement in a Y-Plane game vs. the X,Y grid they learned from?
Having researched in this space, you don't get better results from 'training' on a X,Y space and reducing that training to a Y-grid predictor.
There is a ton of smoothing going on in the video... or the metal conductor plays a huge role in the electrical signals they get from the implanted electrodes. I once blew up a demo because of something like this metal stick as a constant I didn't think to consider.
I highly doubt that, you must be talking about non-invasive electrodes such as EEG. When the electrodes are inside the brain and thus in the cranium, they are effectively protected from outside EM activity since they're in an effective Faraday cage, so your signal has much higher fidelity.
Yeah, I am speaking through non-invasive experience, however, unless your grounding is LIGO level sensitive, sticking a 3 ft metal pole into your mouth takes some significant processing to get a good ground, especially if it comes into contact with the earth and then you change your connectivity with opening and closing your mouth.
Again, low probability, but that just looks like it's asking for problems.
Are you familiar with the term "luddite"?
That aspect of connecting via bluetooth from a phone is most conventionally used to interact with replaceable commodities such as wireless speakers/headphones, but here it's being used to interact with a _live_ monkey. This framing somewhat gives the impression that this living being has been reduced to the status of a replaceable commodity, a mere peripheral that one might connect to via bluetooth.
I agree that given how much modern society relies on animal testing that it's not really a rational response - maybe this reaction could have been mitigated somewhat if they had connected to the monkey via a computer or more involved process rather than simply just the conventional bluetooth pairing flow on a phone.
I understand that, but I think to some degree, you're letting somewhat unrelated things influence your opinion of this.
You know what else it interacted with and controlled wirelessly? Pacemakers. Nobody thinks of those people are replaceable commodities.
Also, what about those that don't live a life of luxury and have access to lots of commoditized devices that wirelessly pair through a cellphone? People in less affluent countries might be less jaded about controlling something wirelessly and still view that as an amazing new technology associated with things they can rarely afford.
So, to what degree are those associations useful and accurate, and to what degree are they you bringing unrelated prior biases to bear?
The good thing about messy, human models of transactions and interaction is that it can take a long time and many different voices can be heard, allowing disuptes to occur and be resolved.
Many of these successful tech corporates work to eliminate the human discussion element, and replace it with digitized (and frequently proprietary, or at least gatekept) rules.
I think I've dealt with a few difficult dominant personality types in the past, and it would not surprise me at all to see them consider humans-as-pets as a desirable future. Match that with digitized 'asset ownership' and other non-repudiable mechanisms and there could be a very dystopian and authoritarian future in the mind of some of these people.
Now I'll make sure to sound like a complete nutter (as if I hadn't already) and mention that some of these individuals and companies are now so essential to the U.S., both domestically and internationally, that they are becoming untouchable.
Meanwhile our own tech industry is busy debating and trying to determine what the future of libre software will look like. It's a pivotal moment and I'm optimistic we'll figure it out to everyone's benefit, but there is a lot at stake.
It's great that this tech could help paralyzed people and amputees, but is it worth the cost?
Edit: This is a moot point if it turns out we can repair the damage from paralysis and amputation using bioengineering.
Why don't they do it on humans then?
Link?
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/premarket-approval-pma/p...
If you've never gone through the process of bringing a medical device to market, well, I'm not sure there's an easy FAQ that will answer your scepticism. But the basic idea is that you have to do a bunch of testing in the lab, then probably a bunch in animals, then finally a bunch in human clinical trials, then you can actually market the device to the public.
Neuralink is in the 'animal testing' phase, and it sounds like they're likely to start human testing soon.
Note that once they've gotten a device approved for humans, that doesn't mean they will stop testing on animals. There will likely be improvements to the device, new protocols, etc. that will necessitate continued testing as new features are brought to market.
Relevant section:
> Among the types of evidence that may be required, when appropriate, to determine that there is reasonable assurance that a device is safe are investigations using laboratory animals, investigations involving human subjects, and nonclinical investigations including in vitro studies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I had the same reaction. I just recently had a lot of trouble pairing Airpods to Macbook (both no more than 2 years old). If Apple can't make it work between their own devices, it's doomed. A piece of shit technology, a black stain on the whole stack.
The demo is impressive otherwise, and I don't think it's weird to control a device with your mind. Or, if weird, it's the interesting kind of weird.
I'd like to see a multi-modal GPT successor that learns not just text, image and video but also neural brain signals. It's one modality we haven't touched on yet. Maybe it will be able to extract speech directly from the brain, which is orders of magnitude harder than controlling a joystick.
Check out https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1119-1
And yes it is definitely orders of magnitude harder than controlling a joystick
With a few decades (years?) of refinement, this technology absolutely has the potential to capture private thoughts.
Sure, it may require an implant, but just like we all carry tracking beacons that have become indispensable to daily life today, in 20 years it may be “the done thing” to have an implant to control your home automation, etc. Or maybe the tech will improve to where it just needs a hat. And at that point, certain authorities will have no qualms about using it in interrogations, with or without “due process.”
It works because there is direct correlation between the speech-motor cortex and how the vocal articulators (larynx, tongue, etc) move, and how that combine to produce speech.
Abstract "thoughts", on the other hand, are not so straight-forward. For one, there's no central location in the cortex where the concept of "car", for example, lives. The distributed representation of abstract thoughts within the brain makes it orders of magnitude more difficult than decoding speech for one specific individual. Then add orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude to generalize that to different people.
Yay for planned obsolescence.
Nobody loves them, but they're important in this case to help parralyzed humans maybe with ALS or some other disease communicate with loved ones
Where it gets funky though is trying to quantify that to an extent: how many monkey disfigurements is worth fixing one human disfigurement? Ten? A thousand?
How many chimps would you blind in order to prevent humans being blinded by the latest lash extension cosmetic?
Is it even controversial that yes, of course they are?
I mean, Boeing and the FAA kept 737 MAX's in the air after brown people died in the first crash when we all know they'd have grounded them if it was a crash in Kansas. We value human lives differently let alone animals.
> How many chimps would you blind in order to prevent humans being blinded by the latest lash extension cosmetic?
None. But I'd blind as many as are needed to trial human eye transplants, for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs
Later versions will be able to shunt signals from Neuralinks in brain to Neuralinks in body motor/sensory neuron clusters, thus enabling, for example, paraplegics to walk again
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1380315654524301315
Much less happy are the animals we eat, those confined in zoos, and many of the pets people lock in tiny spaces.
I think it's a pretty tough topic in ethics but when I was younger, I didn't think much about it because we were doing science. I remember seeing my first rat die. I didn't feel bad at the time because we did it "humanely" with gas (and it's normalized and I was only 20) and they just sort of drifted off and defecated. It's an interesting and perhaps sad use of a life.
Rhesus Macaques [0] have a lifespan of thirty years. Thirty years. Thirty years in a massively controlled environment, often sedentary, with limited opportunities to socialise with peers, and the simple pleasures of mutual grooming, lying in the sun etc. Lab animals that are rehomed in rehab centres / zoos etc are often overweight, in poor health, and have a range of nervous tics and social inexperience. Many adapt to the non-lab environment, but they tend to have underlying health problems and issues with acceptance by the alpha individuals because they lack the years of experience required to understand and fit into the complex group etiquette.
Animals may still be the best model for testing drugs / devices that will go into humans, but lets not understate the massive cost to the individual animals concerned.
[Source: personal involvement with a primate rehab centre]
[0] https://animalia.bio/rhesus-macaque
Sounds a lot like work, to be honest.
I stopped going to zoos because I didn't want to contribute to keeping animals like that, but would like to read information to the contrary if that's the case.
I’ve never been to zoos outside the UK, but here often the primary function is conservation - both of the animals, which are often rescues, and of wider wildlife which is funded by ticket sales
For example, London Zoo is managed by the charity Zoological Society of London [0] and places like Monkey World are essentially rescue centres you can visit [1]
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoological_Society_of_London
[1] https://monkeyworld.org/
Can confirm this (disclaimer- I'm a supporter). Many of their animals are rescues, including more than 70 Capuchins that had been lab animals in Chile and four groups of Chimpanzees, many of whom had been rescued from use in circuses or as tourist props - the latter often with teeth knocked out so that they couldn't bite the punters. There is currently a sadly growing collection of marmosets, most rescued from the UK pet trade after tipoffs from animal protection agencies. Many of the marmosets have diseases such as rickets resulting from their owners' lack of animal husbandry skills (e.g. thinking that all they need to eat is bananas). Most of these animals lack the survival skills or health to be released back into the wild. On a more positive note, Monkey World is also a hub for breeding critically endangered species, e.g. Woolly Monkeys and Orangutans.
Sadly, if an animal is being cared for at Monkey World, it generally means that the specific individual has been abused in the past and / or the species faces functional extinction in the wild.
The one where I live has historically been a bunch of very desolate animal display cases, but they've committed to doing what amounts to a slow U-turn, and they have done quite well in that regard.
The old enclosures were clearly built to keep animals in plain view at all times. They've remodelled a lot of them since, and they're completely rebuilding some. There are times where you don't see a single great ape during a whole visit, because their new habitats have some caves and comfy areas hidden from view, with the result that especially the gorillas now appear to have quite a bit of fun interacting with visitors at the four separate points in their enclosure where that is possible and definitely seem much more relaxed than the previous generations (as far as I can tell, I'm no gorilla myself).
Certainly still worse than a life in their natural habitat, but they are part of a multinational conservation project and all their current gorillas were essentially sent to them via this project, with the end-goal of (as I understand it) having a viable captive gorilla population in zoos around the world so there is a "backup" in case the natural populations collapse. The living conditions they provide have earned praise from experts (for what that's worth, seeing they're not gorillas themselves, either).
They still keep their lions in a tiny, cruel pen, but they're building a new one currently that is supposed to be state of the art. Most monkeys have gotten new accomodations last year I think and they're pretty involved in keeping Kunekune pigs from going almost extinct a second time and they're breeding Visayan Warty Pigs (which are absolutely amazing things, and critically endangered); I guess for a relatively provincial central European zoo with a limited budget, that's quite decent.
They've also recently completed a pretty big section with heirloom breeds of common farm animals and they do a lot of education programs and events for schools, which I feel is something my generation missed out on big time, not necessarily from a zoo, but some kind of getting in contact with animals other than the occasional cat or dog might have been quite helpful. I feel there are some really weird misconceptions about animals that are pretty widespread among people my age.
For what it's worth, I've been quite opposed to that zoo in the past, but their efforts over the last decade or so have been enough to convince me to pay for a year pass. Some zoos are much slower adopting this approach, I surely wouldn't be as supportive of one of those.
It's only a matter of time before certain governments start alpha-testing this type of technology in places like Xinjiang or Myanmar.
For me the strangest part of watching this is not the lab work or the animal, but the implications of this technology and where it might lead to in the future once applied to humans. I really like the idea and premise presented, but let's be honest: There are also way too many evil use cases ...
[citation needed]
http://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/learn-from-nazi-medical-rese...
1) The deliberately soothing British voice does not come off as soothing. It comes off as insidious, and threatening. This is in part influenced by our own cultural context with media like Black Mirror, but the effect is there nonetheless.
2) The comparison points to "pair with your iPhone" feel WILDLY misaligned with the rest of the message. The premise of Neuralink is that this is a world-changing cutting edge technology for the good of humanity. Then all of a sudden you have a situation where a living sentient being is paired to an iPhone like some sort of bluetooth speaker. It reeks of confused ethics.
I think you put your finger on why that part was unsettling.
Also, if I may ask, do you think we have to choose between caring about these individuals and caring about those in factory farms? I personally care about both (as well as plenty of other ethical issues, naturally). And I imagine other people feel the same. So your suggestion that we measure the two causes against each other is rather confusing.
I don't think these monkeys are "not worth discussing" - but I don't think they merit more than a cursory evaluation. The same is true for say, people that are killed by falling coconuts.
There are, in all likelihood, cost-effective causes that you can donate to, in terms of your dollars, skills and capcity to give a damn. I'd suggest these monkeys shouldn't make the list.
I'd understand if you said they didn't make the cut for you personally, but I'm not sure why you'd be invested in ruling them out for everyone.
(And this a sidebar, but I think one could quite reasonably believe that advocacy here is worthwhile in exactly the bang-per-buck utilitarian sense you're invoking. For instance, people who are galvanized on behalf on these monkeys might then change their actions towards less visible, less relatable nonhumans like pigs, chickens, and fishes.)
The latter point (galvanised to support other welfare causes) is roughly what inspired the original post - our intuitive emotional reactions to visible harm should indeed encourage effort in investing in effective harm reduction advocacy. But if seeing these monkeys makes you sad, you really ought to think about all the less-visible, cheap to attack welfare issues that are available.
So I do very much appreciate the spirit of your comment: that we should attend to less visible (and more easily addressed) harms, and not get caught up in 'celebrity causes,' so to speak.
But I think where I differ from you is that I don't view it as an either-or paradigm. I'd say to people "Go ahead and try to help these monkey individuals, and also work for, e.g., food-farmed nonhumans (who are easier to help, etc.)"
I appreciate the risk you're citing, that people could effectively "waste" time and resources on a case like this. But I'd argue there's a greater risk in approaching ethics as A) zero sum, and B) generalizable. I'll elaborate:
A) It's certainly true that we only have so many minutes in the day and so many dollars in our wallet. But I think these zero-sum resources are often not the final limit on what we can do. Rather, the limits we reach are emotional and psychological energy - which is often not zero-sum. Getting engaged in an issue (especially when it's an issue that radicalizes you) can actually increase the amount of time and resources you find for other issues. (I.e., you reclaim it from less important stuff.)
B) I'd argue ethics is patently not generalizable (in the sense that you're suggesting - i.e. that everyone should reach the same conclusion about which cases are worth effort), simply because humans are so varied. One person might have tons of money and be happy to spend on this cause in addition to whatever they give to help farmed nonhumans. Another person might feel a special bond with monkeys that makes this an easy, non-taxing (or even net-energy-positive) issue to engage in. Yet another person might currently find the plight of food-farmed nonhumans overwhelming to consider, but these monkeys will be a stepping-stone issue that help them get there. Etc.
In a more developed, market society, you typically have several commoditized, replaceable products and most tend to leverage BT. The idea of replaceableness belongs to the product itself, but what we see in common for all of them is BT connectivity, so we tend to perceive BT as an identifier of replaceableness as well.
Neuralink very casually and tongue-in-cheek BT "paired" to the monkey, reinforcing the idea of replaceability and commoditization of the monkey.
Many people have empathy for animals and monkeys are seen as precursors to humans. It's very easy to see how treating a pre-human species like a replaceable product, leaves humans themselves creeped out and feeling like in the future they may also be treated like a replaceable product.
Neuralink needs an ethicist in a high exec position or board and a better PR manager. They should have done some of these to reduce that perception mess: - allude to the use of BT in serious medical applications before "pairing" with the monkey - reduce or change the common BT terms like pairing - use a computer rather than a smartphone - don't mention BT, just say wirelessly connected - don't use a Bond-villain smooth British voice
By talking about it as a PR problem, I don't mean to say that is the root cause, it is just what we can see at the surface.
Do they really care about ethics? Is it execs, engineers, video directors, everyone, no one? Do they care, but are just bad at PR? Do they not care, and this video is a reflection of that? This is what matters, for all those people to genuinely care about ethics.
Can they still genuinely care though, after becoming a corporation? Can bringing shareholder value align with ethics?
One botched video is simply one data point in the public trying to understand Neuralink's genuine stance on ethics.
Only people with close contact to Neuralink will really know. We are all hyper connected, but sadly, only superficially.
Who wouldn't want to ultimately be assimilated by the Borg?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T0de66wOE4Y
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJJPbpHoPWo for a video of the pong demo in humans.
The motor cortex seems to have a clear, learnable signal though it is rather noisy sampling <1000 locations.
Mary Lou Jepsen at Open Water has ideas about how to do this non-invasively [3].
[1] https://www.braingate.org/publications/
[2] https://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2006-07/06-...
[3] https://www.ted.com/talks/mary_lou_jepsen_how_we_can_use_lig...
I think the applications of this are going to be in research for years, not as implants that paralyzed people can readily use.
NL’s approach is scalable due to their robotic insertion system which can implant a (multi-channel) thread every few seconds. It should be possible to hit a few thousand channels within the window of a few hour surgery. They do face the same challenges with size, weight, and power that everyone else does, which forces trade offs on the bandwidth, ability to isolate spikes from individual neurons, and number of active channels.
The primary limitation of this approach is that the needles cannot easily insert deeper than the outer layer of cortex (to my knowledge). This limits the application space to anything with recording or stimulation targets on the surface. Motor prostheses and gaming are perfect for this due to the anatomy, but many other medical applications require deeper targets, which their sensor cannot readily hit at the moment.
Is there a big loss of time sending the signal down to the arm, or is the reaction time mostly cognitive anyway?
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity
Keyboards and mice will be phased out very quickly since you can just thought type, so the computer accessories industry will dry up as well.
If the device allows you to write to limbs, you will probably also be able to write to motors. Expect a lot of specialized vehicle related jobs (excavators, forklifts, cranes) to become remote-first with skilled operators working inside call centers or at home. This is already happening but the presence of Neuralink means contracting companies don't have to pay for expensive joysticks, knobs, switchboards, etc.
Of course this doesn't consider the impact on the entire world changing overnight, which will probably upend modern capitalism for the first time in a century.
I am not a vegan/whatever/animal activist, but maybe we should allow terminally-ill or death-row volunteers for this kind of experiment... With good money for the family, and I think some people would like to help mankind in the end. It is better than dying without accomplishing anything in life.
So, you have at most one year with an inoperable tumor, and you will not travel because you want to be close to your family. Would you be a volunteer for this research, for 500 thousand dollars? (monkeys are cheaper, but you are the real deal)
I don't think it's a good idea to allow death-row inmates to do this though; They'd likely be pressured into volunteering as the only way to delay the execution.
On the other hand, non-human primates are readily available in a controlled environment, can be used to generate huge amounts of data specific to a diverse set of tasks and experiments that you just can not do on the human patients.
The brain is a complex machine that is extremely hard to decipher just by studying a single species or one kind of experiments. The need for studies across species with a hundred different ways of collecting and analysing data is essential to first understand the mechnasims of the brain and only then (hopefully) be able to causally alter it for specific applications in medicine and so on.